From John Nack's blog: "In the interest of giving customers guidance as early as possible, we have some news to share on this point: in addition to offering 32-bit-native versions for Mac OS X and 32-bit Windows, just as we do today, we plan to ship the next version of Photoshop as 64-bit-native for Windows 64-bit OSes only."

Apple typically supports its products for about 2 years, and they break API compatibility with EVERY release, which typically means once a year.

Eh, what? Tell me what broke during the transition from Panther to Tiger? From Tiger to Leopard? Apple releases a new version of OS X every year? There isn't an ounce of truth in anything that you've said.

The fact that there are applications that work on Leopard and not on older systems has little to do with broken APIs. It's because Apple is introducing new APIs and in the case of Leopard, Objective-C 2.0 which developers willingly adopt that makes it impossible to support older versions of OS X. If the developers were so inclined, they'd ignore the new APIs/features and target 10.2+. It is still possible, but nobody does it since most users rarely lag by more than one OS X version.

Linux is the worst when we are talking about ever-shifting APIs, the linux API will often break compatibility in minor bug fix releases.

No? You're confusing API with ABI.

When you look at it this way, you see why Linux has next to no commercial support, Apple has a moderate amount (although mostly from small shops with agile teams), and Microsoft is the one that ISVs love the most.

If Microsoft could have dumped Win32 and MFC support, they would have gladly done it years ago.